The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

Mark S. Smith is a scholar of ancient Near Eastern and biblical religion, and this Eerdmans book, revised into a second edition from its 1990 original, is the standard scholarly treatment of how the Canaanite deity El and other regional gods converged into the figure of Yahweh, and how Israelite religion subsequently differentiated itself from its Canaanite context. Its strength is that it works directly from the epigraphic and textual evidence, Ugaritic texts alongside the Hebrew Bible, to reconstruct this historical-critical picture rather than assuming any one tradition's later theology as a starting point. Its limit, and the reason it should be read carefully, is exactly that historical-critical reconstruction, it is not what Judaism, Christianity or Islam themselves teach about the nature of God, so a claim about any of the three traditions' own theology needs a source speaking from within that tradition.